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Every politician dreams of the perfect oppo research, the one piece of information that makes your rival utterly toxic to voters. The late Edwin Edwards, a colorful stick who rose to his fitting station as governor of Louisiana, memorably boasted that he could only lose if he was “caught in bed with a dead girl or a living boy.” With his mischievous mind, Edwards created two horrible scenarios, but there are other scandals that can undermine a political career.

Imagine if you found a document where an aspirant to a high office rants happily about shooting a young dog and executing other family pets.

This hypothetical story may seem too far-fetched to ever happen. But South Dakota Kristi Noem, who is allegedly on the short list as Donald Trump’s vice-presidential choice, has revealed that she is a cheerful killer of domestic animals. Even more amazingly, the evidence of Noem’s pet murders was revealed not by some animal-loving investigative reporter (a possible combination of St. Francis of Assisi and Seymour Hersh) but by Noem himself in his political manifesto that would be released soon, No Going Back: The Truth About What’s Wrong With Politics and How We’re Moving America Forward.

From the title, one would guess that the book is the standard boilerplate of right-wing talking points, the kind of partisan screed that the printing presses churn out with depressing regularity.

But this particular political pamphlet contained a strange and sickening trip to the massacre of a pet, almost as if a Wall Street Journal suddenly an editorial about tax policy contained long graphic passages from Cormac McCarthy’s extremely violent novel Blood meridian (1985).

According to Guardian reporter Martin Pengelly, who read an advance copy of Noem’s book, the book contains an extended account of how the governor killed a hunting dog called Cricket as well as a pet goat. Noem later mentioned that she had recently killed three horses.

According to Noem, Cricket was a bad dog who had an “aggressive personality.” Birds were constantly attacked by crickets (perhaps not surprising, as the dog was trained to hunt pheasants). Cricket didn’t know how to behave, but went “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life.”

Noem admitted, “I hated that dog,” and Cricket was “less than useless…as a hunting dog.”

In German, the concept of the Subhumans, the subhuman being who is unworthy of life. In those terms, Cricket was an Underdoga dog that deserved to die.

A cricket finally went too far when it attacked a neighbour’s chickens. Noem writes, “At that moment, I realized I had to put her down.” The lawman took the misbehaving mutt to a gravel pit and finished her off with a gun, execution style. She admits, “It wasn’t a pleasant job but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realized I needed to do another unpleasant job.” With her bloodlust unquenched, Noem killed a “vile and mean” goat in the same gravel pit, another family pet that failed to live up to Noem’s high ideals for tame beasts.

Responding to the story, Trump’s former adviser, Sarah Murphy he wrote, “When I saw tweets about Kristi Noem murdering her puppy, I thought to myself, ‘Damn, one of the other VP contender teams found some oppo,’ until I realized SHE wrote about it in the CAH book . I’m not sure why anyone would brag about this unless they were sick and twisted.”

Murphy’s comment raises an interesting question: Why would Noem go out of his way to rub the public’s nose in this harrowing story, as if voters were bad dogs who needed to be disciplined?

The real surprise is that Noem, despite being condemned by liberals and conservatives alike for her cruelty to animals, thinks she is practicing good politics.

In the past few decades, the GOP has become the party of Darwinian supremacy politics and a performative viciousness. This trend has only intensified with Trump’s victory as the undisputed leader of the party. In a phrase popularized by Atlantic author Adam Serwer, for too many Republicans “the brutality is the point.”

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Noem is clear about this. A big part of her political brand is her toughness and willingness to inflict pain and suffering. In 2020, she refused calls for stay-at-home orders during the Covid pandemic despite the rapid spread of the disease in meatpacking plants in her state. She supports her state’s strict anti-abortion law which bans abortion in all cases except if the mother’s life is in danger.

In tweet defending her murder of Cricket, Noem draws a parallel between the difficult decision to kill a pet and the difficult decision to prioritize economics over health during a pandemic. According to Noem,

What I learned from my years of public service, especially leading South Dakota through COVID, is that people are looking for leaders who are authentic, willing to learn from the past, and who don’t shy away from difficult challenges …. Whether running the ranch or in politics, I have never handed over my responsibilities to anyone else to handle. Even if it is difficult and painful. I followed the law and was a responsible parent, dog owner, and neighbor.

It is likely that Republican women in political office may feel an additional need to prove their toughness in order to quell gender bias. In 2008, Sarah Palin, then trying to assert her continued political viability after being on a losing presidential ticket, released a video of herself being interviewed while turkeys were being slaughtered in the background. In 2014, Joni Ernst, in her successful run to become a senator for Iowa, released an ad in which she bragged about growing up castrating pigs. With Palin and Ernst as well as Noem, there is also a claim of rural authenticity, a claim that they represent the real America and not the effete urban cities where people don’t kill animals with their own hands.

Noem may also be making a subtle, if misguided, introduction to Trump, who is known to hate dogs, at least on a metaphorical level. As I pointed out back in 2018, when Trump uses the word “dog” he almost always uses it as a term of abuse. At various times Trump has said or tweeted: “Mitt Romney had his chance to beat a failed president but he choked like a dog,” “I hear @EWErickson from Red State fired like a dog,” “Robert Pattinson shouldn’t take Kristen Stewart back. She cheated on him like a dog and will do it again – watch,” and “@BrentBozellone of the lightweights of the National Review, came to my office begging for money like a dog.”

Trump’s use of the word “dog” is tied to his more brutal politics. The great literary critic William Empson traced the evolution of the word “dog” in his classic 1951 book Complex Word Structure. He argues that “dog” was almost always used as an insult in the harsh world of the 16th and early 17th centuries by writers such as Shakespeare, who had a character statement in Anthony and Cleopatra, “A slave, a soulless villain, a dog.” It was only with the restoration of the Stuarts in 1660 and the more peaceful 18th century that writers, notably Samuel Johnson, used “dog” fondly as a term of endearment.

Trump’s atavistic use of “dog” as an insult creates a harsh world of dog-eat-dog, one where fighting is the norm. In that world, one either kills or is killed. By actually killing a dog and bragging about it, Noem may be trying to show that he’s a Trump-style tough guy, a literal killer.

But, of course, the downside of this political pitch is that many people are repulsed by the murder of pets. Like Politics notes:

Cricket sounds like a puppy: scruffy, wild and in dire need of training or possibly a new home…. We are not sure who advised Noem on this book. But whatever hell Mitt Romney endured as a presidential candidate in 2012 for driving with the family dog ​​on the roof of his car, expect Noem to face even more anger from the masses of Americans, across ideological and party lines, who will are left completely horrified by the killing of animals out of what appears to be little more than annoyance.

Noem has made a bold gambit with her new book, but apparently her hopes of joining Trump’s presidential ticket have just died the death of a dog.

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